Suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students, and 24,000 suicide attempts occur on college campuses nationwide each year, according to national statistics.
Students, faculty and staff at NC State can play an important role in suicide prevention through Question, Persuade and Refer, or QPR, training — a community-based, nationally recognized and empirically grounded suicide prevention program.
Through this training, individuals are taught to recognize verbal, behavioral and situational clues, how to question a person about suicidal thoughts, persuade them to seek help and refer them for help.
“QPR is a program where only certified instructors can facilitate,” said Tina Nelson-Moss, the program manager of the NC State Violence Prevention and Threat Management Program and NC State Risk Assessment Case Manager. “My office provides the training to faculty and staff while the Counseling Center provides the same training to students.”
QPR training began with faculty and staff in January of 2012, according to Nelson-Moss. NC State’s Counseling Center has joined over 160 other colleges and universities offering QPR.
“Prior to 2012, my office partnered with the Counseling Center, and we looked at different suicide-prevention curriculum programs, which led to us selecting QPR,” Nelson-Moss said. “It is a great program that allowed us to be able to use with both students and employees.”
The QPR program, which is from the QPR Institute, also takes less time than other program options, according to Angel Bowers, assistant director of outreach at the Counseling Center.
“There are some programs that are eight hours, 12 hours, and that obviously wasn’t really realistic for our students,” Bowers said. “We wanted to get as many students trained as possible with at least some basic skills, and over and over again, QPR was the program that overarching universities were using.”
The training program aims to teach through experience and educate the participants on national, state and NC State-specific statistics regarding suicide and what tools they can use to assist someone else.
“The training for employees is scheduled for two hours,” Nelson-Moss said. “This allows us to have 30 to 45 minutes for them to be able to practice the skills they had learned during the class. They learn how to question someone about suicide, the signs of someone in distress and/or possibly being suicidal, how to persuade them to stay alive and refer them to resources — it’s an interactive class.”
Students receive the same information and training as the faculty and staff, and there is an additional role-play experience along with the presentation of facts and data.
“We start off with a lower-level role play where you’re focused on active listening skills and just focused on creating a relationship with that person in that moment,” Bowers said. “Then we would do more of a higher-level role play where’s there’s actually some level of risk involved. It’s putting the trained person in that position in the role of asking questions about someone’s suicidality and asking them about their available resources and connecting them to resources that are on campus.”
Everyone in the room isn’t necessarily doing a role-play, but they are at least watching one, according to Bowers. Observing the concrete behaviors and actions in those situations still supplements the training.
Individuals can register for QPR trainings online through the Counseling Center’s suicide prevention page. Faculty and staff can register with the Violence Prevention and Threat Management Program. According to the suicide prevention page, groups can also sign up for QPR training that is tailored to their specific groups.
“If we’re talking to a specific student group and they have questions about ‘how might this impact our group in particular?’ Then we can try to bring in some statistics that are related,” Bowers said. “If we’re talking to the GLBT student organization, or to a veteran’s group, or a women’s group, or men’s group or something along those lines where they want something more specific to their group, we can definitely bring in data to support that as well.”
About five Counseling Center staff members were trained in QPR in the beginning of its instillation at NC State.
“Representatives from the Counseling Center and my program obtained certification to be an instructor, purchased QPR booklets to distribute to participants and customized the presentation to meet the needs of our university community before rolling it out,” Nelson-Moss said.
All resident advisers have had QPR training, according to Samantha Blue, a sophomore RA at Welch Hall studying mathematics education.
“People should go through this training because it really opens your eyes to the true seriousness of suicide and what you can do to prevent it,” Blue said. “Also, the training helped you understand that you can help prevent suicide if you just look for the little signs.”
Upcoming QPR classes will be held March 23 and April 12 from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.
For more information, visit https://counseling.dasa.ncsu.edu/workshops-and-events/suicide-prevention/
